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Rome – Mauro Del Vecchio, former General of Italian Army who led the unit of 7,000 soldiers that entered Kosovo in June of 1999 after end of NATO air strikes on Serbia told Italian ‘Panorama’ weekly that during the first three weeks of the mandate ‘reports on the found bodies of killed Serbs and Romas arrived on his table each morning’, but that was a taboo topic they were not allowed to speak about with journalists.

‘The killing continued later but not so frequently. Those that have not fled Kosovo were under permanent risk to be killed or raped. Deserted Serbian houses were leveled to the ground or set on fire. Albanians were attacking the churches and monasteries, too. Their goal

was to erase every trace of the Serbian presence in Kosovo’, Del Vecchio said. Today he is representing the Democratic Party in the Italian Senate.
The ‘Panorama’ weekly published for the first time photographs of Serbian victims made by Italian soldiers in 1999.
‘Nobody was taking Serbian bodies that were left in all possible places. Mothers and wives of abducted Serbs were pleading for their dearest to be found, but the majority of them have never been found, not even those that were dead’, Del Vecchio said.
The Italian weekly reports as a ‘horrifying fact’ that 70 percent of the total number of abducted Kosovo Serbs had disappeared after June 1999 when the war was officially over.
The magazine has also come in possession of photographs that the UNMIK soldiers found in Decani in 2003 but has not published them because they were ‘horrific’. They show the KLA members smiling with a cut off head of a Serbian reservist. Another photograph shows them putting in a bag at least two cut off heads. It is also said that at the time when the photographs were made that was the zone under command of Ramush Haradinaj.